Search form

Wired has some News on e-publisher MightyWords, and it\'s not good news. It seems MightyWords emailed more than 5,000 authors that have stuff with MightyWords, half of them were told to hit the road, the other half got their royalties cut from 50 percent to 70 percent of what they\'re contracted for now.

\"We are interested in building a company that is here for the long term,\" said Judy Kirkpatrick, executive VP and general manager of MightyWords. \"What we are doing is fine-tuning a sustainable business model.\"

Searcher has a Story on Preprint Servers. The term \"preprint\" most often refers to a manuscript that has gone through a peer-review process and now awaits publication in a traditional journal. They say there is a \"critical mass\" of great information available here that cannot be ignored. There are pros and cons to this that make it quite interesting. Remember the \"Cold Fusion\" story from a few years ago? That was a Preprint story that didn\'t work out so well.

Bill Tucker recommended this Story on CNN about Margaret Atwood. She just won the Booker Prize for Fiction for \"The Blind Assassin.\" Winning the Booker Prize will often double a books sales. \"The Handmaid\'s Tale\" was a good book, but a bad movie, I hope that doesn\'t happen to \"The Blind Assassin\".

\"By the time the women\'s movement came along I was pretty much wondering where they had been all that time,\" she said. \"(But) I was happy to see them. ... They were an audience who began understanding what I was writing about.\" The women\'s movement validated her writing, she said.

Newsbytes.com is reporting New Hampshire court granted the father of a public school student access to obtain records of all students who used a computer in the school. The interenet records could not be considered as having the same legal protection as \"library user\" files, because the records could be produced with confidential information redacted.

So if library records can be produced without confidential information are they open too?

Here are the findings from the Urban Libraries Council Study on internet in libraries. The research study, The Impacts of the Internet on Public Library Use, consisted of a national random telephone survey of 3,097 adults conducted during the spring of 2000.

75.2% of Internet users also used the library and 60.3% of library users also used the Internet.

Use of the library and use of the Internet were inversely related to age.

Use of the library was not significantly related to race/Hispanic ancestry.

Use of the library and use of the Internet were positively related to educational attainment.

ZD Net has another Story on that Peacefire Study about politcal sites that got blocked. Congressional candidate Jeffery Pollock used to advocate Internet filters, and then he got blocked. He says to find out that schools can\'t see his site is \"very disturbing\". Here\'s the funny part, Cyber Patrol did a \"test\" of their own that showed the site was not blocked, but after ZDNet did the same \"test\" on their own, the site Was blocked. Strange, it\'s almost as if Cyber Patrol was lying. Peacefire\'s Bennett Haselton said:

\"Much like the work of aircraft mechanics, library scientists don\'t get enough respect.\"

Before you jump all over them for saying \"library scientist\" instead of \"librarian\" give the article a read. It is very complimentary to librarians, of course there are pleanty of other reasons to jump on them:

\"There\'s a lot of insecurity among librarians about what they know that other people don\'t. The truth is that non-librarians often believe they can find and organize information.\"

Remember Steve Coffman\'s ELL story in Searcher? He proposed making an Amazonian library with all the Amazon benefits. Infotoday now Says OCLC\'s new strategy may just be on track to reach this goal. OCLC\'s new Four Corners strategy:

Metadata-Formerly called cataloging, but now expanded beyond the traditional OCLC records to new sources from a variety of partners and even some pre-publication metadata, all designed to serve the end-user and the librarian

Content Management-Will enable OCLC to help librarians manage their local collections, including archiving and digitizing local collections

Discovery/Navigation with the next generation of reference services, such as the Portal Management Service—Will help librarians create their own Web sites and portals, as well as effective interfaces for patrons dealing with the Extended World Catalog

Fulfillment-Rapid information-delivery services, including an integrated \"Click to Borrow or Buy\" feature.

I think most librarians would be happy if they just lowered their prices.

The LA Times has a Review of 3 e-Book readers, the REB1100 and REB1200, from RCA and the eBookMan from Franklin. The review is interesting enough, but the interviews and comments from Harold Bloom and others are just great.

\"I regard all this as one more horrible disaster,\" Bloom said. \"I hope it sinks without a trace.\"

\"If you are in search of information, go ahead and get an e-book. If you want to drown yourself in information, there is the Internet.
\"But if you are longing for wisdom, you need a real book.\"

\"This exhibition hopes not so much to judge censors and censorship but instead to provoke questions. Every day some form of censorship occurs in the United States. This prevalence of the red pen in a country founded on the Bill of Rights suggests that most people consider some things or ideas too dangerous or offensive to be made widely available. Is there a line in the sand? And if so, where do you stand? Where are your limits of tolerance? As you move through the exhibition, we invite you to consider whether or not there are restrictions which you might impose on the First Amendment. Are there situations in which you might support the suppression of materials or ideas? Note, also, the silence which accompanies your journey through the exhibition, a poignant reminder of the voices suppressed through the ages.\"

Charles Davis sent along This Story on The New Library in France. The computers and other sytems were so bad the staff went on Strike when it first opened in 1998. A fire ripped through one of its underground corridors a month ago, and now it has reopened, only to make the employees sick. The unidentified malaise causes violent headaches and a burning sensation in the throat and eyes.

\"As a precautionary measure, the library will not open again until we have the results of new chemical and bacteriological analysis.\"

\"Two blocking software, or censorware, products were tested to see if they filter out political candidates. Settings typically used in a library or school were tested. Numerous politicians were found to be censored by this software, which collectively is used in tens of thousands of schools and libraries across the country. Peacefire tested the Web sites of political candidates from a variety of parties, to see which were blocked by N2H2 Bess and Cyber Patrol, two of the most popular blocking software programs used in schools.

While blocking software companies often justify their errors by pointing out that they are quickly corrected, this does not help any of the candidates listed above. Their campaigns have been sabotaged in our public schools and libraries, and corrections made after Election Day do not help them at all.

When the British Library decided to get rid of a historic archive of American newspapers Nicholson Baker was bought it for himself. Now he wants to save \'the raw store of history\' that microfilm and the internet are wiping out. He is also the one who sued the San Francisco Public Library under the Freedom of Information act to release details of its \"hate crime against the past\" a few years ago when they went on the book dumping binge.

\"Say your grandparents had a wedding picture in this paper: what difference would it make to you if you saw the actual paper, instead of printing it off microfilm? The first would link you directly to that past event - it\'s difficult to explain why that would be true, but it is. The past exerts a stronger pull, it becomes realer, more understandable somehow when you have the actual document and not a copy.\"

Andrew Dillon has written a nice story for the ASIST Bulletin. He talks a bit about the mid-year summit 2000 in Boston, and issues that are facing the IA field. He says \"Now is the time for some testing of ideas, and as we know only too well, testing invariably leads to re-design and often the revisiting of original assumptions. Now it starts to get really interesting.\"
This column will appear in the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science.

In this article on Traffick.com,
Nicholas Mercader suggests that early working models of the peer-to-peer file sharing concept are just the beginning of a major rethinking of search and retrieval on the Internet.

Las Vegas Review-Journal has a Story with a different take on filtering for the kids terminals. The Library used to deny computer access and Internet information to children under 18 who did not have permission from their parents to use the resources. Now they put on filters and allow all kids access, librarians say there say they\'d rather see it that way.

But the benefit, she said, \"is we\'re giving more children more access to more material than we were before, when they were required to get permission from their parents before they could even do word processing on our computers.\"

Michael Lambert Ssuggested thisStory from S.F. Gate
entitled \"The Big, Greedy Monster\" by Deborah Wilder the mayor of Foster City. She says the Educational Revenue Augmentation Fund is ripping off libraries in CA. $2 million would go back to the San Mateo County Library and nearly $7 million to the Santa Clara County Library, if they stop.

Publisher\'s Weekly is running a Story on the Bertelsmann(BMG) / Napster thing. BMG owns Random House, who, I\'m sure you know makes more than a few books. This raises the question, will they turn napster into a Docster like system for all the E-Books Random puts out? Random says they have had no real discussions on this, yet.

\"we always look forward to exploring mutual interests with any company that can guarantee both the security and sanctity of the copyrights of our authors as well as their opportunity to receive fair compensation for their writing\"